of their co-religionists: they told him
that they were charged with exterminating the latter with the exhaust fumes of
a Diesel engine in a little house (...) upon which a placard announced (...)
the "Heckenholt Foundation"  from the name of the Jew in charge of
operating and servicing the engine." " (...) Police Captain Wirth...
commandant of this camp... and an SS officer, his assistant, (...) were
persuaded that in Berlin nothing was known of what went on here (...). They
said that here only a train of a few cars arrived from time to time, two ore
three up to the present day (August 18, 1942). Accompanied by Wirth and his SS
assistant, he (the mysterious personage) also visited the small house
appropriated for the exterminations (...). A heightened ground floor, a
corridor, with on each side, three small rooms which he did not measure but the
area of which was surely less than 5 x 5 (meters  perhaps 4 x 5 at the
most. At the end of the corridor, the room in which the Diesel was located
(...)."

In reply to a question from Rassinier, the mysterious
personage specified that the duration of the gassing was a quarter of an hour;
but Rassinier thought that it must have been between one hour and a half and
two hours.

"The next morning, between seven and eight
o'clock, the convoy of Jews which had been announced arrived: a train of four
or five cars, about 250 to 300 people  men, women, children, old people
 and not 6,000 to 6,700 piled into 45 cars, as is claimed by the Gerstein
Document (...). No brutality, no doors ripped off, no bludgeoning (...) Then
one had them enter the building of the crime; in a haphazard manner, they
divided up in the six rooms  40 to 50 per room... The doors were closed
up, the lights turned off; and, at that moment, the unfortunate people were
heard beginning to pray. Cries of fright, also, of the women and children..."

On his return to Berlin, the mysterious witness

"went.., directly to Dr. Grawitz, who was
his friend and a direct collaborator of Himmler. At the account he gave him,
Grawitz jumped up, horrified, and without waiting, rushed to Himmler's (...)...
about ten days afterwards, Dr. Grawitz came himself to tell me,"

said the personage.

"... that an investigation was in progress
on the facts I had brought him, and a few weeks after... that the camp was
closed and Globocnik once again transferred."

And farther on:

"... what interests me... is the problem of
the extermination by gassing, the only one by which the honour of Germany is
really at stake... in 1950 you gave a most correct interpretation of it when..,
you concluded that there were very few exterminations of this type, and that
only one or two madmen among the SS (...) were responsible for
them."

Rassinier himself wrote,

"If I have insisted on concluding this
chapter with this account, it is on the one hand because an historian worthy of
the name must not hide anything that he knows; and on the other because I could
not seriously challenge it... and that rightly or wrongly, the good faith and
the sincerity of its author had seemed evident to me. (...) All this.., does
not mean that I guarantee this account (...)."

The whole story is
hard to believe: the deep mystery which hides the name of the personage as well
as the date, the country and the place where the conversation was held
justifies all doubts and all suspicions. Had any other historian, especially
Jewish, presented an account disturbing to Rassinier in such non-verifiable
similar conditions, one senses